o o p R o F I L E 5 PUBLISHER. II-BIG DAY FOR. RANDOM B ENNETT i\. CERF, president of the publishing firm of Random House, and more wIdely known, perhaps, as the country's most Indefati- gable disseminator of printed jokes (his chief vehicles have been ten humorous anthologies, ranging, chronologically, from the 1943 "Pocket Book of War Humor" and the 1944 "TrJ and Stop :Me" to the 1 9 5 6 "Life of the Party" and the 1 9 5 9 "Bennett Cerf's Bumper Crop;" one "Encyclopedia of :\1odern American Humor;" a six- day-a-week King Features syndicated hox, also called "Try dnd Stop Me," which appears in three hundred news- papers; and a weekly department, "Ben- nett Cerf's Cerfboard," In This If eek 111agazine, a feature of forty Sunday newspapers), as a regular coast-to-coast lecturer on publishing and humor, as one of the principals, along with Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and John Daly, of a Sunday-night television pane] program called "What's M J LIne?," and as the endorser, directl} 01 by in1plication, in large newspaper and magazine advertisements (frequently ïdorned with pictures of himself), of a variety of products, ranging from L & M cigdrettes and Heuhlein's Mar- tinis to the New England Mutual LIfe Insurance Company, is a tall, hrovvn- eyed, energetIc, confident, mercurial, boyish, cheerful, hard-working, neat, orderly, glib, likable, unsophisticated, sensitive, ruthless, self-publicizing, re- sourceful, argumentative, shrewd, in- nocent-looking, generous, extravagant, hospitable, enthusiastic, unaffected, o- ciable, pleasure-loving, vocal, excitable, wealthy, healthy, lucky man of sixty, unsparing of himself and demanding of others, as warmhearted in private life as he is professionally dispassionate, with a big, well-run brownstone house on East Sixty-second Street, whIch he acquired in 1 941, and d photograph of which, in one of seven teen scrapbooks of Cerfiana that he has pasted up so far, he has captioned "The Cerf Ances- tral Seat;" a bigger, well-run white clapboard house in :M t. Kisco, which he has lavishly peppered with tele- phone-memorandum pads and match hooks bearing sketches thereof and its name, "The Columns," a tribute to a maJor source of the fortune that enabled him to bur it and provide its forty acres with a country-club-size, robin s-egg- blue, cabañaed, telephone-equipped swimming pool, a tennIS court, a formal garden, and an informal, two-hole golf course, among other amenities; a calm, energetic wife, born Helen Nichols, of Oklahoma CIty, who changed her name to Phyllis Fraser when she went to Hollywood as a child actress, and who is such a good housekeeper that Good H ousekeepzng once asked her to write an article (on her hus- band, and entitled "My Husband Is No Joke to Live With"); two sons, Christopher Bennett, seventeen, and ] onathan Fraser, thirteen; and an im- pressive collectIon of suits, running largely to dark blue with a subdued diamond pattern, made by Arco & Mac- Naughton, Danny K.aye's tailors, and of Sulka pajamas, Bronzini and Gourielli ties, and Dunhill pipes (one hundred), which he stokes with Dunhill's Mixture A-9666, to say nothing of radios, tele- vision ets, and leather telephone-hook covers, leather-bordered calendars, and leather-sheathed cIgarette boxes. In ad- dition to tennis and golf, he is a dev- otee of bridge, poker, bicycle riding, professional baseball, motion-picture previews, the theatre, Cadillacs, sing- ing songs with old friends, Toots Shor's, Lindy's, and the consumption of Life Savers, toasted-almond Hershey BaIs, sourballs, Blum's candy, New Or- leans pralInes, cheese, peanut hrittle, and slTIoked turkey. This lucky man is lucky on a number of other scores as well, one of which IS that he was financially independent at sixteen He was born on May 25, 1898, at 121st Street and Seventh Ave- nue, in a pleasant residential section of Harlem, the only chIld of Gustave Cerf, a lithographer who designed la- bels for ketchup bottles, canned goods, and :\ilurad cIgarettes. The boy's moth- er was a daughter of Nathan Wise, the owner of the Metropolitan Tobacco Compan}, wholesdle distributors. The Cerfs' actual ancestral seat was pre- 1 H 71 Strasbourg-then, as again after 1918, French-and Bennett's given name is an adaptation of his Alsatian- born paternal great-grandfather's Be- noit. He went to Public Schoo] No.1 0, at 11 7 th Street and St. Nicholas A venue, and, after hIs family had moved to 157 th Street and RIverside Drive, to Townsend Harris Hall, a nearby public high school, where, at 49 "" I Bennett -"1 Cerf sixteen, he graduated second in a clas" of three hundred and was class salutato- rian "Howard Dietz and I lived in thL Riviera Apartments together, and went to college together, along with Dick Rodgers, Oscar Han1merstein, :Morrie R yskind, and Hern1an Mankiewicz,'" he says. His m('lternal grandfather died when he was twelve, naming him the ultimate beneficiary, after his mother, of a trust fund of over a hundred thou- sand dollars, and this came to him on the day before hIs sixteenth bIrthday. As hefitted a solvent salutatorian, he took a course in hookkeeping at the Packard Commercial School, and then, in 1 915, entered Columbia, wheI e, nicknamed Beans, he was known for hIs proficiency at bottle pool and his double-harrelled extracurricuial activity a a daily col- umnist of the Spectator, the under- graduate newspaper, and editor of the J ester, the undergraduate humorous magazIne. At college, luck, in the form of the FIrst World \\T ar conjoined with his Spectator chore, agaIn descended upon him. Early in 1918, in hIs third year at the School of ] ournalism (then an un- dergraduate department at Columbia), on dropping in at the Spectator's edi- tOrIal room" to turn in copy, he picked up a release from the Dean' office, for publication the next day, to the effect that students who volunteered for thL armed serVIces would receIve full credit for the courses they were currently tak- ing. Within the next hour, he had signed up for a breathtaking number of courses in addition to his pre-peek load, including some of considerahle scholas- tic stature-ancient languages, science, and so forth-and within a few davs he had enlIsted in the Infantr) ()fficers'